So they finally did it, Google killed Reader, as the news broke on Wednesday evening the internet erupted in howls of anguish, how could they take away something so vital? Supposedly its death is due to declining usage and Google’s desire to focus on fewer products but many suspect it is simply another casualty in the drive to get everyone on to Google+. One thing is for sure, Reader users were passionate about the service, the outcry reached far and wide and an online petition to keep it running hit over 100,000 signatures in just a few days and currently stands at almost 122,000.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force as if million of users typed “Google Reader alternative” into their search box at the same time.

Personally, it has been one of my most used tools, something that I would use many times every day, a feed reader is by far the easiest and quickest way to keep up with the vast flow of news and information generated every day on the internet and is invaluable for keeping up with those blogs that only update sporadically. There are all sorts of reasons why killing Reader is a bad idea, Rupert Goodwins explains better than I ever could in this article on the Guardian website but the fact remains that come the 1st of July it will be no more so a replacement had to be found.

Reader’s dominance hasn’t left a lot of competition but there are still several similar services around, Newsblur, The Old Reader and Feedly to name just three, perhaps unsurprisingly the first two at least have been suffering from the load of all the new sign ups and were slow and unresponsive or completely broken when I tried them (I didn’t try Feedly) but I’m sure this will improve with time.

Another option is self hosting which is what I have decided on, there are at least three options here, Tiny Tiny RSS, Selfoss and Newsblur again. I went with Tiny Tiny RSS, it has some great features, a nice clean interface, active community and a decent Android app, running it myself also means I am in control and it isn’t going to go away all of a sudden.

If like me you used the RSS Subscription Extension for Google Chrome to add feeds to Reader then you just need to add a new entry and you can use it with tt-rss, in the options for the extension just add a new entry with the URL as http://SERVER/tt-rss/public.php?op=subscribe&feed_url=%s

Yes, there have been a lot of changes in tt-rss since this post and a lot of the classes have been modified or had names changed, it’s moved on quite quickly with its new found popularity. There is now a built in way to collapse an article so I’ve been using that instead as that’s all I wanted.